Cooking under fire
How to Cook a Wolf By M F K Fisher Daunt Books £9.99
The past few months have seen a number of comparisons to the suffering and deprivation of the world wars.
Some have been more felicitous than others. Perhaps the most sensible is Daunt’s characteristically shrewd republishing of M F K Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, which first appeared in the United States in 1942.
For a certain sort of American (and, indeed, European), the presence of Fisher looms large over food. The usual comparison is to say she is the American Elizabeth David, but that is not quite right. Elizabeth David set about introducing the English to a whole new, European world of food. In teaching them how to cook, she engendered a new pleasure in eating. Fisher is more interested in a sensibility of food. As anyone who cares about taste should be, she is also attentive to style; her prose is as pleasurable as her food.
The wolf of the title is the hunger that war shortages produced. How to Cook a
Wolf is a guide to thrifty cooking and, at times, survival. Though this is not something that much bothers food writers these days, it’s not a bad thing to be reminded of. Indeed, one of the best recent books on food, The
Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler, addresses this subject head on. It is a knowing homage to How to Cook a Wolf and a way to ‘clear a path through’ complications. One of the points of food is that knowing about scarcity can make the plentiful more delightful.
Fisher approaches her subject with a bracing practicality: ‘No recipe in the world is independent of the tides, the moon, the physical and emotional temperatures surrounding its performance.’ There’s something reassuring about knowing that, if it all goes wrong, it might not be your fault.
It is in this practical vein that Fisher approaches all aspects of a meal when you have no money and can’t get hold of most ingredients. She takes in everything from boiling water, the cooking of eggs – ‘probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg’ – to the carving of meat and the preparation of vegetables. She even includes the essential subject of self-care. (Her recipe for soap, however, might not be the one you immediately turn to.)
For someone with such an authoritative tone, she is curiously open to other interpretations. On the subject of how to fry eggs, a simple enough subject, she writes, ‘The best way to find a trustworthy method, I think, is to ask almost anyone but me. Or look in a cookbook. Or experiment.’
A truly great cookery writer will make you want to cook something because of the words on a page alone. Elizabeth David does just that. Her instruction for a salad dressing to contain ‘no more than a suspicion of vinegar’ makes one want to know where those suspicions might lead. Fisher does not do this, certainly not in recounting how the wolf’s ‘pungent breath seeped through the keyhole’.
Her recipe for soufflé sounds, frankly, revolting. ‘In a soufflé, add one cup of puffed cereal to the three separated eggs, and you will have food for four people.’ To this line she adds, in a subsequent edition of How to Cook a Wolf, ‘…at least three of whom, I feel impelled to add, you dislike intensely and hope never to see again.’ It is this wit and respect for taste that make Fisher a great food writer.
One of the joys of this edition of the book (1951) is in seeing Fisher’s commentary on her own earlier work. When she writes at the end of a chapter, ‘For one of the few times in the past thirty-odd years, I am pleased with something I have written. I think this is a good chapter,’ it is hard not to share in her pleasure.
If you are looking for an American authority on French food of the early20th century, there is no doubt that that other US expat Alice B Toklas is a more reliable guide. But if you want to see the product of that imagination at its most relaxed, precise and unfussy, then snuggle up with this big bad wolf.